Yvonne Roberts says the trivia-obsessed British media is incapable of reporting on social care issues seriously.
Mystified as to why social care issues fail so often to get the coverage they deserve in the national press? Concerns such as support for adults with autism; care of disabled people from ethnic minorities; the imprisonment of children in secure units who have committed no offence. Why are such topics mostly relegated to specialist supplements and make the main news pages of our tabloid and broadsheet newspapers only when a major scandal occurs?
Part of the answer came last week in the form of findings from a survey conducted on behalf of the Journalism Training Forum, chaired by Ian Hargreaves, director of the Centre for Journalism Studies at Cardiff University. It tells us that there are 70,000 journalists in the UK - 60,000 in publishing and the remainder in television. Tellingly, journalists are mostly young, white, middle class, without children and living in the South East. All facts which are bound to influence the way in which the daily news agenda is drawn up.
Damningly, only 4 per cent of journalists come from ethnic minorities while only 3 per cent of entrants have parents who are in semi-skilled or unskilled jobs. Hargreaves warns: "Journalism is in danger of drifting in the direction of unintended apartheid. Without strong measures to address recruitment and career development of people from minority communities, British journalism has no chance of representing the communities it seeks to serve."
What's also interesting is the narrowness of the survey's vision in defining what constitutes "a community". Why not also measure the proportion of disabled journalists?
Hargreaves argues that the preponderance of middle class recruits is the result of the failure of the British education system. He argues for more effective mechanisms of recruitment and better targeted financial support systems to widen the pool.
Almost any journalist impassioned by the issues of, say, poverty, social exclusion, and childhood abuse will tell a similar story. Sooner or later, a white, middle class, young commissioning editor will deem the topic "unsexy" or "depressing". As if the only task of the press is to entertain and distract, not analyse and examine and expose what the establishment is doing, or failing to do, on our behalf.
Of course, there are some middle class members of the media who have a broader vision but too often they are buried in the slag heap of celebrity trivia which frequently passes for journalism today.
Read all about it? Not in the British media, you won't.
